Real Estate Deals of the Year 2015 winners revealed

Winner, Office Lease in San Francisco: Salesforce
The cloud computing giant signed the biggest office lease in San Francisco’s history, taking 714,000 square feet in the tallest office building west of Chicago — the 1,070-foot Transbay Tower under construction at 415 Mission St., which will be renamed Salesforce Tower.

The Bay Area real estate market hit new highs yet again in 2014. Office rents kept skyrocketing. Home prices continued to soar. Land deals hit new highs. Office trades smashed records.

The fundamentals of a strong office and housing market drove some bold, and even surprising, deals. Tech companies made big bets to take control of their real estate destiny.

Buy. Sell. Lease. Salesforce did it all last year in executing a thrilling real estate strategy to build a major corporate campus in the emerging Transbay neighborhood. The man behind that strategy is Ford Fish, described by peers as steady, competent and calm. Under his longtime guidance, Salesforce’s real estate footprint has become the largest of any tech company in San Francisco, with 2 million square feet expected by 2017.

It was quite a year for Salesforce, but other tech companies had astonishing real estate deals under their belts as well. Uber sealed a series of leases on Market Street, no surprise perhaps, and then unleashed a stunner. It announced its intention to build a huge campus in Mission Bay with Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

In addition to office deals, a slew of new residential projects finished. Ambitious rehab developments and record-smashing land sales also took the spotlight.

We’re celebrating many of these record-setting deals and projects in the 2014 Real Deal Estate Deals of the Year.

Click through the slideshow to see the winners and finalists in all categories as well as the Real Estate Deal of the Year and the Dealmaker of the Year.